RED meat, cellphones, plastic drinking bottles, artificial sweeteners, power lines, coffee… Which of these have been linked with cancer? If you are unsure, you aren’t alone. The problem isn’t a lack of information. Rather, we are bombarded with so much information and misinformation about what might cause cancer that it is often hard to separate myth from reality.
Yet it is something we must all do, because cancer affects every one of us. Whether or not you have had it yourself, you surely know someone who has. For people in the UK, the lifetime chance of being diagnosed with the disease is 1 in 2. Globally, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death, killing an estimated 1 in 6 people.
Cancer is not a single disease and its causes are many and complex, but there are things we can do to reduce our risk – if only we could identify them. That isn’t easy when even the experts don’t always agree. Nevertheless, our knowledge has come a long way in recent years, thanks to a huge amount of research into both environmental factors and genetic susceptibility. So, what do we know – and don’t know – about the causes of cancer? And, when faced with mixed messages, how can we best judge the risks for ourselves?
The extent of public confusion on the subject was glaringly exposed in a survey of 1330 people in England published last year. Researchers from University College London and the University of Leeds, UK, reported that more than a third of the general public mistakenly attributed carcinogenic properties to artificial sweeteners, genetically …
